JET INVOLVED IN FATAL CRASH
LINKED TO CORONADO WOMAN

Singer Jenni Rivera, six others killed; investigation takes new turn

The mystery surrounding the weekend death of singer Jenni Rivera and six others deepened Tuesday as word spread that the Lear jet that crashed in northern Mexico on Sunday was owned by a company with ties to a Coronado woman.

The company, Starwood Management LLC, was the subject of a subpoena by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration obtained by The Watchdog in June.

The subpoena sought information about the company’s business relationships with Gabriela Dávila Huerta, a Coronado woman held in Mexico in connection with an alleged conspiracy to smuggle Moammar Gadhafi’s son to a coastal resort area.

The son, Saadi Gadhafi, was wanted by Interpol related to the brutal suppression of the uprising in Libya.

Rivera, 43, was a Long Beach native who found international success as a grupero singer. She was known as the “Diva de la Banda” and was at the zenith of her popularity before the fateful crash this weekend.

Mexican authorities are investigating the accident. Officials from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board have joined the investigation.

Although Starwood is based in Nevada, the June DEA subpoena was addressed to a registered agent for the company in Long Beach.

In the document, federal agents were focused on business relationships between Starwood and Christian Eduardo Esquino-Nunez.

Nunez was indicted in 2002 by a federal grand jury in San Diego on charges of conspiracy and fraud related to falsified airline logs, court records show. He pleaded guilty two years later, was sentenced to two years in prison and was later deported.

In the early 1990s, Nunez was indicted on drug trafficking charges in Florida, where federal prosecutors accused him of providing planes to drug dealers smuggling almost 500 kilograms of cocaine into the U.S., ABC News reported.

By 1993, Nunez pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal “the existence, source and transfer of cash” from the Internal Revenue Service and he was sentenced to five years in prison, ABC News reported.

The same ABC News report said Nunez owes millions of dollars in state and federal taxes and also owes an undisclosed amount of money to the norteno band Los Tigros del Norte.

Nunez’s federal conviction involved documentation for six aircraft that Nunez and a partner purchased from the Mexican government with plans to sell to buyers in the United States, court records state.

The Lear jet that crashed Sunday was not one of the six planes involved in that criminal case.

According to ABC News, Starwood was sued in a Nevada federal court by two insurance companies alleging fraud. Those records say Nunez kept his criminal past secret when he signed policies on two aircraft later seized by the DEA.